Professor Trevor H J Marchand

Professor Trevor Marchand is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and Honorary Research Fellow of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Clermont-Ferrand. He is active as an independent researcher, author, consultant, and Action Learning facilitator. His subject expertise includes craftwork, skill and apprenticeship; architectural heritage and place-making; and embodied cognition and communication.

Nigeria. After completing studies in architecture at McGill University (1992),Professor Marchand received a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Award for Canadians to conduct an independent field study with mud-brick masons in the Hausa Emirate of Zaria, Northern Nigeria. The 18-month project examined traditional building practices, craft skills and apprenticeship training – topics that remain central to his anthropological research.

Yemen. His PhD in social anthropology (SOAS 1999) was grounded in ethnographic and historical data collected during a 13-month apprenticeship with minaret builders in the South Arabian city of Sanaa. That study resulted in his first monograph, Minaret Building & Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001). With the start of the Yemeni Civil War in 2014, and with funding from the MBI Al Jaber Foundation, he curated an exhibition on the country’s extraordinary architectural heritage, titled Buildings that ‘Fill My Eye’. Accompanied by an edited volume on Yemeni architecture and a public educational programme, the exhibition opened at the Brunei Gallery in London (2017) before travelling to the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin (2017) and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (2018), where it attracted an estimated 250,000 visitors.

Mali. In 2001, Professor Marchand resumed fieldwork in West Africa, this time labouring and apprenticing with a team of mud-brick masons in Djenné, Mali. Supported by the British Academy, the study resulted in his second monograph, The Masons of Djenné (2009). The book received the Elliot P. Skinner Award (Association for Africanist Anthropology), the Melville J. Herskovits Award (African Studies Association), and the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology (Royal Anthropological Institute).

Further research with Djenné masons generated a special issue of the IAI journal Africa, titled Knowledge in Practice (2009, co-edited with Kai Kresse); a first documentary film, The Future of Mud: A Tale of Houses and Lives in Djenné (2007, co-produced with Susan Vogel and Samuel Sidibé); and a major exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Djenné: African City of Mud, with an accompanying public lecture series (2010). Subsequent studies with the masons resulted in a second documentary film, Masons of Djenné (2013), and a long-running exhibition, Mud Masons of Mali (2013–present, co-curated with Mary Jo Arnoldi), at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

London. In 2005, Professor Marchand was awarded a three-year ESRC Fellowship (RES 000-27-0159) to study craft knowledge and vocational training among fine-woodwork trainees in England. Employing an apprentice-style method, he investigated hand skill, creativity, communities of practice and the social politics of craftwork. Fieldwork was carried out over two years at the Building Crafts College in Stratford, East London, earning him a City & Guilds Diploma in fine woodwork. The project resulted in his monograph, The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England (2022), and also enabled him to advance a theory of embodied cognition and communication grounded in Dynamic Syntax theory and neuroscience research. He convened a lecture series and workshop on ‘learning and knowledge’ that yielded a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute titled Making Knowledge (2010).

In 2013, he took up a one-year British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to further his studies with woodworkers. This project focused on the evolving relationship between the human brain, hands and tools; and on bench-based problem-solving with tools and materials in the flow of physical activity. Outputs included the edited volume Craftwork as Problem Solving (2016) and the documentary film The Intelligent Hand (2015), featured on the RSA Inequality in Education Network website.

In 2014, Professor Marchand was awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute for his contribution to the discipline, and he was elected to the College of Lecturers of the Association for Preservation Technology International (APTi).

Recent studies & academic activities. His continuing research with craftspeople, tradespeople, artists and performers ultimately aims to expand popular definitions of ‘knowledge’ and promote greater recognition of the intelligence in skilled work.

Professor Marchand left his post at SOAS in 2015 to dedicate more time and resources to research, writing and creative work. The first of his new field studies, commissioned by Craftspace (Birmingham), was with Ugandan-British artist Andrew Omoding, documenting his creative processes and problem-solving strategies in the flow of work. The results were featured in the exhibition Radical Craft, which toured the UK for 20 months in 2016–17, as well as in numerous publications and his short documentary film The Art of Andrew Omoding (2016).

At the end of the Covid lockdown in the UK, he was commissioned by a multinational packaging manufacturer to carry out an ethnographic study in one of their plants, aimed at understanding and helping to resolve tensions that had arisen between (semi-)skilled shopfloor workers and management during the pandemic.

His current research, titled Mathematizing in Motion: Taking Measure in Dance, explores embodied mathematizing, specifically the ways classical ballet dancers “calculate”, structure, organise and responsively adjust their gestures and bodily movements in the flow of activity without the use of formal mathematics.

Academic, committee & administrative posts. 

Professor Marchand served as Anthropology Research Tutor for five years and supervised 18 PhD students to completion. He has acted as external examiner for numerous PhD dissertations; Publications Officer and Film Officer for the Association of Social Anthropologists; Trustee of the Firth / Radcliffe-Brown Fund; Arnold Rubin Book Award jury member; Trustee of the Paul Oliver Vernacular Architecture Library (POVAL) at Oxford Brookes University; External Assessor for SEP for anthropology in the Netherlands (2020); and advisor for the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP). He has lectured for the Society of Asian Art (Berkeley), consulted for ICOMOS and served on the ICOMOS World Heritage Committee; held positions on the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute; and contributed as a member of the RAI Publications Committee, Research Committee and Education Committee. Most recently, he has served as Scientific Director for the Aliph-funded project Recovery & Reconstruction of Islamic Monuments in Sanaa (2022–24).

He is currently an advisory board member for the Arcadia-funded Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme at Oxford Brookes; a member of the scientific committee of the journal Lectures anthropologiques; an Honorary Member of the European Federation for Architectural Heritage Skills (FEMP); and a lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America tours and for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art tours. He is also co-convenor of the RAI/UCA online seminar series Artistry@Work, and a lecturer for the RAI online course Anthropology of Skill & Craftwork